Technology transfer from space science instrumentation

Abstract

Summary form only given. New advances in high energy astrophysics are now being realised with the launches in 1999 of ESA's XMM-Newton space mission and NASA's Chandra astrophysics observatory. Novel instrumentation techniques, developed for these missions, are now being moved into other fields of application as diverse as dental imaging, cancer diagnostics and metallurgical nondestructive testing. The academic environment, in which the space research programmes originate, has to operate closely in partnership with the industrial manufacturing base in the process of exploiting the technology transfers. There remains a large gap in the UK between the academic research environment and an industry-produced market product. In the Space Research Centre at Leicester, we seek to close this gap through joint industry-academic programmes and the use of (limited) exploitation funding schemes to accelerate the technology transfer process, but at the same time retaining leading edge scientific research in our field of space science.